41–49 of 49 posts
Sadly the website is offline, but if you like a hard copy cloud book I can heartily recommend the following. During my spell in Antarctica, I had to act as a meteorological observer (clouds are still manually encoded into METOBS that are entered in by WMO stations). This required learning the 10 types and being able to characterise the full picture of the sky. It made me a total cloud addict, and spurred a far deeper…
Sadly the website is offline, but if you like a hard copy cloud book I can heartily recommend the following. During my spell in Antarctica, I had to act as a meteorological observer (clouds are still manually encoded into METOBS that are entered in by WMO stations). This required learning the 10 types and being able to characterise the full picture of the sky. It made me a total cloud addict, and spurred a far deeper…
Sadly the website is offline, but if you like a hard copy cloud book I can heartily recommend the following. During my spell in Antarctica, I had to act as a meteorological observer (clouds are still manually encoded into METOBS that are entered in by WMO stations). This required learning the 10 types and being able to characterise the full picture of the sky. It made me a total cloud addict, and spurred a far deeper…
It is amazing how much of 'it' is going on in the skies once you start noticing. There was a thread this winter on solstices, with commenters expressing wonder at how could humans figure those out. If you notice sunrises/sunsets day after day over the years, it is inescapable. It's sad that we the modern humans spend so much time hunkered below opaque ceilings. But I will say this, having interest in cloud-spotting a…
Sadly the website is offline, but if you like a hard copy cloud book I can heartily recommend the following. During my spell in Antarctica, I had to act as a meteorological observer (clouds are still manually encoded into METOBS that are entered in by WMO stations). This required learning the 10 types and being able to characterise the full picture of the sky. It made me a total cloud addict, and spurred a far deeper…
Are you able to know and/or predict things about the weather by knowing the different clouds? Like cumulonimbus = thunderstorm, stratus = maybe rain, sure. But what about the others?
We also did air observations for pilots. If you saw certain types of cumulus near peaks, called lenticulars, pilots wouldn't go near them because they're caused by pretty dangerous winds dynamics.
It's all connected, which is why it gets so fascinating. Sadly, I never pursued meteorology beyond hobbyist, but I'd love to!
What I find fascinating objects of beauty are the ways different clouds modify light or are illuminated by different kinds of light, from the belt of Venus to different kinds of halos to crepuscular and anti solar rays. I remember that one time where anti-solar rays painted pole to pole "longitudes" on the hemispherical dome of the sky. It's too bad we don't have photographic memory, or at least I don't. It is such a…
I'm having trouble understanding the Belt of Venus one. Isn't purple expected to be there per ROYGBIV? Also the second image looks orange to me, not purple. > It is a pinkish glow that surrounds the observer This also makes no sense to me, or else maybe observer is jargon? But there's no hyperlink... The photographer certainly doesn't seem to be surrounded by a pinkish glow. Is it just a name for the purple part of t…
Normally "purple" is used for colors that are equivalent with a mixture of red and blue, so that none of the spectral colors can match that mixture.
"Violet" is also used for colors equivalent with a mixture of red and blue, but which have so much more blue than red that there are monochromatic colors in the spectrum which can match that color and which have a frequency higher than the monochromatic colors that appear blue.
The fact that the monochromatic colors in the violet range have the same color as a mixture with a lot of blue and a little red is caused by the fact that the human red photoreceptors have a defect, instead of filtering only red light they have a second peak of absorption in the frequency range of the monochromatic violet light, so the violet light is perceived by both the blue photoreceptors and, with an attenuated value, by the red photoreceptors.
The acronym ROYGBIV should better be forgotten, because it is not known with certainty what Newton meant by "blue" and "indigo", so this acronym is misleading for the people familiar only with modern English.
It is pretty much certain that Newton did not use those words with their present meaning. He used them based on the labels of some artistic paints that he happened to have at home. His indigo paint (i.e. with indigo pigment) appears to correspond with what today would be called "blue", while his "blue" paint seems to have actually been a blue-green paint (i.e. the color that is complementary to red, and which is also called correctly turquoise and frequently but incorrectly cyan). Thus it appears that Newton meant to say that the 7 spectral colors are red, orange, yellow, green, blue-green, blue and violet, which makes sense.